Recently several GFX9000 products were released. (New versions of Magic and V9BMP, the OPL4 Wave Editor and the 25th Snowfall Demo). On #msxdev, I heard several people announcing they'd like to make a V9990 game soon.

Of course, you can always buy a GFX9000 at Sunrise, but strangely there is not a single MSX Emulator around that can emulate the GFX9000. Even the openMSX team recently said they had no plans of implementing GFX9000 emulation in the near future.

There is a very wide range of MSX emulators out there, still none of them have GFX9000 emulations, and as far as I know none of the developers is planning to implement it. Is this because implementing V9990 emulation is very, very difficult, or is this because emulator developers are underestimating how interesting this could be? (Or am I overestimating that?? )

Team Bomba would be very interested in gfx9k emulation too! Especially since our next game will be made for gfx9k, it'd be _very_ handy to have it emulated!!

I asked the developers of openMSX about gfx9k once, and they said it was somewhere (quite low I imagine) on their TODO list. But... maybe we could convince them to focus on gfx9k emulation a bit earlier?

yes i want an V9900 emulation!!!!

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There is a very wide range of MSX emulators out there, still none of them have GFX9000 emulations, and as far as I know none of the developers is planning to implement it. Is this because implementing V9990 emulation is very, very difficult, or is this because emulator developers are underestimating how interesting this could be? (Or am I overestimating that?? )

The amount of Gfx9000 software compared to the total amount of MSX software is ofcourse incredibly small. The amount of Gfx9000 software among amateur MSX software is already a whole lot larger, maybe even larger than MSX turboR software. So 'interesting' is a relative term...

Emulation of V9990 should be fairly simple. Afterall, V9990 is still V9938 based! Ofcourse COMPLETE V9990 emulation is a lot of work, because it certainly has a lot of features. Nevertheless, an incomplete V9990 emulator supporting the most used graphic modes would be very easy to make from an existing V9938/58 emulation engine.

Developers can base their emulator on the information in the Gfx9000 Programmers Manual.

Well, I'm not asking for perfect emulation of the V9990 right away, but I think it -should- be emulated in the end. And it would be really cool to see some 'first steps' soon

Annoyed by the fact that I had no possibility to watch Guyver's snow demo, I decided last weekend to see if I'm able to implement V9990 support for openMSX.

DISCLAIMER: It's most probably going to cost me quite some time, so don't expect anything working in the next few months I have to familiarize me with (a) the V9990, (b) SDL, (c) openMSX and although I do have quite some programming experience, I've never programmed anything serious in C++. All in all quite a challenge

I've had a first glance at the openMSX VDP source, the V9990 Application manual an I will definitely check out the Programmer's Manual at TNI's site (thanks for the pointer, Guyver)...

See y'all in Oss

Eric/AuroraMSX

good luck! if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I'm planning on writing a more descriptive section to the programmer's manual, as it currently is more of a glorified reference than a manual

just a week ago I got confused because I couldn't find information about a certain feature I thought the V9990 had, but I just didn't look in the right place ^^; All there is to know about it (except for some undocumented features under investigation) is in there, but a lot of it is hard to find as it might just be a small note somewhere. ^^;

So euhm, how are things going?

Anyone going to emulate the network thingy for the MSX?

Henk: ;p. But, actually, it should be fairly trivial I think. Well, 'trivial' may not be the right word for it, but it should at least be easier than Gfx9000 .

~Grauw